


How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

by tigrrmilk



Category: Macbeth - Shakespeare
Genre: F/M, Gen, Letters, Witchcraft, prayers as spells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 13:32:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12458817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: They all remember the day Macbeth left with his men. A muddy sky; a smear on his cheek. And they’ve heard the songs -- someone must have come home, some men must have brought the news back because it’s here. It’s in the air. Macbeth and his men and the rest of them; together. The story is much as any witless child could have told it.Lady Macbeth is looking for a sign that there might be something more.





	How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [twistedchick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedchick/gifts).



 

_ all weeds now must     spring up as herbs _

 

 

 

Her hair is not red, although in some light it may shine so. Her most familiar lady kneels by her low chair and starts to undo her plaits. She will not sleep with them in; she will not suffer such tight pain at her temples as it gives her to do so. The other ladies -- two, for there are three in all -- are lighting the candles in her chamber.

Her son by her first marriage is still too young to be sent away. He is too young; she  _ insists _ . He sits on the floor and tugs at the ladies’ stockings and skirts. He has toys that her ladies have whittled from wood, decorated with bark and nuts and strange forest dyes.

He is not a curious child. He holds a rattle in one hand, but it’s quiet.

There is a thunderstorm rolling in; it’s no use putting him to bed yet. He’s three.

“The stone is so cold,” the Lady says. It’s not a complaint. Her bare feet are drawn up in her chair, and she puts them onto the ground one at a time, then withdraws them again. As if they were stung; no, as if the ground were water.

All of that water and electricity whistling through the air outside.

Heather and thistles and autumn posies on her nightstand, tucked into her bed. Her first lady is murmuring old words as she undoes the hair. Dead flowers fall out.

The Lady places a hand on her belly, experimentally. She is still not used to this. This has happened to her before; she never got used to it then, never, not at all. “Isn’t it strange how the castle changes,” she says, although that’s not really what she means. “Isn’t it strange how different the land feels from one age to the next?”

She is young. Perhaps not as young as she was; but she is young to be a widow, and remarried.

Her first lady does not stop murmuring. Her hair is only half free. Some of the individual hairs raise towards the heavens like static, like lightning. Like a halo glimpsed but more felt than seen. It is not red. The others look at each other. “Each age is different,” the second says. She is wary. The third tries to teach the toddler, the Lord’s stepson, how to use the rattle. How to be loud. She tries to get him to make a fist.

“Don’t want to,” he says.

The Lady has a small stack of opened but not answered letters at her table. From her younger sister, the Queen of Scots. She is allowed ink and she has some paper, but she’s not sure what there is to say.

Her second lady stands by the doorway and brews -- a potion. An infusion. There’s no cauldron. What’s that? Something warm. Something like tea. Waybread, nettle, mugwort, and whatever else is nearby. And water. And water. She places it on the Lady’s table, next to the stack of letters.

“For another boy?” The Lady says, and sighs. She drinks it anyway. 

“Perhaps,” the second lady says. “Perhaps not.” She chews on fennel seeds.

“I hear tell that the men will return from the battlefield soon,” the third lady says. The toddler, the lord’s stepson, has such a beautiful mess of curls. 

“And where did you get that news?” The Lady asks, casting husks of fennel and dead leaves across a sheet of paper. She studies them and spots of spit and blood from her mouth as if they are words. Her gums are tender; later, she will drink another cup, and another, and she will be set right again. “News only travels as fast  _ as the men _ .”

Her ladies look at each other again. The first has finished taking out the plaits, and with a shake of each of her wrists she stands and peers at the paper. She can’t read; none of the ladies can. Their Lady can read in three languages and speaks about the same. But even so.

“It’s what you’ve got here,” she says, and curls her fingers. “Look at the loop of this nettle string. How about this crow’s foot?” To the Lady it looked more like a star, a clumsy mess of fennel seeds.

“I think about what I would do for my children,” the Lady says. Her son has started to beat a rhythm with his rattle against the far wall. “And about my husband. I thought this new one would be stronger, somehow.”

They all remember the day Macbeth left with his men. A muddy sky; a smear on his cheek. And they’ve heard the songs -- someone must have come home, some men must have brought the news back because it’s here. It’s in the air. Macbeth and his men and the rest of them; together. The story is much as any witless child could have told it. Lady Macbeth is looking for a sign that there might be something more.

The room is cold; it’s not just the floor. Lady Macbeth wraps herself in sheepskin instead of wool (a luxury; the sheep had to die for it) and furs and thick, rough sheets. When she is alone; when her husband is not home.

It was much the same with her first husband. It was the same room, the same floor. She has a touch more fur now. She has a wisp of white hair just above her left ear.

“Every step I take now, I have taken before,” she says. The castle doesn’t feel so big when she’s inside it. The weather has been too bad, and she has been too cautious to venture much outside. And so, the drafty castle rooms, the flat castle floors.

Her ladies know the secrets of fire, and sickness, and of holding five fingers up to the wind to learn something new each day. One of them hails from the south of England; one of them from the northernmost isles, and the third will not say. 

Her pillows are stuffed with herbs. There is an old tree that has started to curl inwards, almost brushing against the window of her chamber. It whispers, and Lady Macbeth does not want to hear what it has to say.

“A daughter would be just fine,” she says. “After all, what am I? I am not queen.”

“Would you like to be queen?” her first lady asks. What is she doing now? Rubbing something dried into the fire, which is stubborn and small. Scraping her left foot against the grate. So what, if it’s iron forged in something much hotter and deeper than this? Heat is not always bad, and it does not always kill or break or make something new. Sometimes it should just be.

“I would rather stay married to this one for a while,” Lady Macbeth says. “I will soon have two children of two husbands. That is enough for me.”

She is not so far along, but far enough. Each night she whispers a prayer, or a charm, for good luck and a fair future. Each night she closes her eyes and dreams away the roof. The sky is red where the heavens show through. The sky is red at night, and clear at morning.

The child will draw with chalk on the walls, and it rubs off with time and carelessness and boredom. He draws sheep, like clouds, and circles, and towers.

“There’s a lot to be done to make you queen,” her third lady says.

“More to keep you there,” the second says.

The first doesn’t say anything. The fire is sputtering against the grate.

The crashes of lightning have started outside. Nobody is paying attention except Lady Macbeth’s son, who has pressed his face against the window. Is he yet three? They had expected him to cry, but he isn’t crying. Just jumping in wonder every time the crashes hit and the lightning rolls.

Lady Macbeth sweeps the wet herbs from her desk, and back into the wooden cup. “Do you think he is a good king?”

“I don’t understand the question,” the third lady says. 

Lady Macbeth walk to her basin, wincing from the cold with each step. She ashes her hands clean of the last remnants of the herbs, which drift to the bottom of the bowl.

“They give him garlands and taxes and blood,” she says. “And...”

She moves to stand by the fire. Her hair is puffed-up, rising particularly at the crown of her head. She sighs. “I wonder what it is to have the throne. I wonder how much more it allows. Or are the rooms just smaller, ever smaller.”

“They are bigger,” the first lady says. “For you, they will be bigger.”

The second lady chimes in. “I can see many paths for you. One of them towards the sky. Through all of the seven worlds.”

Lady Macbeth rolls her eyes and throws the wet scrap of paper to the fire, where it damply curls and is then consumed. “Too much,” she says. “I almost believed you.”

She looks at her son, who has one dead father and one reluctant surrogate. Who was born in this castle, under a different lord. A different sky. A previous age. And no, he is not yet three. “My sister writes often,” she says. “Her hand is poor; but she married before she had finished her schooling...”

She became queen simply by marrying.

“Isn’t it hard,” she says, “how men become king by killing or by simply being born. And yet we ladies have to rely on the marrying? Isn’t being born hard enough?” She knows from before that the birthing is hard; and yet she is triumphant. She is hopeful. She is with child again. She is something new.

“We make ourselves,” her first lady says. “All the same.”

A string of -- of all things -- cress is tacked above the fireplace, but out of reach of the flames. And Lady Macbeth takes the letters to bed, and does not touch her bible or prayer book. There are more letters elsewhere in the castle -- letters to Macbeth about the fostering of his stepson in a far flung castle elsewhere, letters about his retainers, letters about rumblings in the islands. Letters travel only as fast as men do.

Lady Macbeth reads her letters, and the words rustle and fly through the air. Her sister’s hand is clear, all the same. “Can we make the future, or are we just bound to it?” She says, finally, as the ladies are putting out the candles and readying themselves for sleep. It’s a question, but there’s no answer. There are herbs and dried flowers and prayers that are sung like spells, but no answers yet. “What would my husband say?”

She pauses. “And I wonder what the other one would have said to that.”

A rustle of leaves against the roof of the silent stone room. The burst of thunderstorm rain, electric and shocking on its own. The lightning has moved on, is pushing its way up out of the ground back to the heavens. And the sky in the morning is pink, and the sky the next night is purple, and Lady Macbeth is pregnant, and she hears tell that one day soon her husband will once again be home.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you very much for the prompt for this - i hope this is close to what you wanted.
> 
> inspiration for my take on this came from [this discussion](http://16ruedelaverrerie.tumblr.com/post/155865903254/how-many-children-had-lady-macbeth) of the "how many children had lady macbeth?" question. and my herbal knowledge is nonexistent; i took a tiny amount from [this poem](http://www.heorot.dk/woden-9herbs-i.html). which is... an anglo-saxon text rather than a celtic one. i'm aware. forgive me.


End file.
